#MusicForWriters: John Supko and ‘Rest’ For Musicians, Human And Otherwise

‘The Algebraic Picture Of My Self And Soul’

I think there’s something counter-intuitive about a lot of innovation in music in the last 20 years, in that so much of it has been driven by technology. You can create endlessly complex variations of things using sequencers. So much innovation using technology, it’s just constantly at warp speed, expanding.

So there’s something kind of old-fashioned, really, about working with an instrument builder [in lutherie, with Aron Sanchez]. It is amplified, but essentially, there are no effects on it, it’s just wood and strings. I like the idea of innovation but in the old sense of the word.

This week, meet the flip side.

Composer John Supko may not be “constantly at warp speed,” but he’s definitely working on the technological end of musical innovation. And there’s easily as much for writers to find in his music as there is for them in Dessner’s. These are two powerfully gifted artists whose compositional strengths demonstrate not only some of the range of contemporary classical work today but also the complexity of its voices.

For all its importance to the contemporary classical music scene, the five-piece band—composer/guitarist/director Mark Dancigers, clarinetist Sara Budde, bassist Logan Coale, pianist Michael Mizrahi and flutist Alex Sopp, plus composers Patrick Burke and Judd Greenstein—has released surprisingly little in the way of recordings. Its latest, Dreamfall, is only their third anthology of new works for the ensemble, and these new kids are all grown up by now.

There’s music here from Greenstein, Andrea Mazzariello, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Nathan Williamson, Mark Dancigers, and Scott Smallwood. But I’m focusing today on Supko’s work, divine the rest, the fifth track on the album, the most contemplative of the works on the CD, and the most writerly: Supko here, as ins_traits, is using text. Here’s some:

still vaster thoughts visit me
I have read and I have forgotten
the question of bursting
memories of tufts
memories of unconsciousnesses
I walk on alone in the room
the politeness and the Augustinian opposition of knowing
the algebraic picture of my self and soul
the active vitalities must be forgotten
still vaster thoughts visit me
you ask me what you think
in sleep the pleasure

Beautiful, isn’t it? I’ll give your compliments to the machine.

This is “generative” text, and you hear bits of it in Supko’s arresting 10-minute work which he has created expressly for the NOW Ensemble. To give me those phrases, he had to transcribe what he could hear on the recording, himself. In other words, Supko didn’t actually write this. And neither did “anybody” else. This is why wordsmiths love this guy. He’s doing something even more viscerally gymnastic with the language than most novelists are.

The music, itself, is generative, too. In his notes for the piece, Supko writes:

I try to generate serendipity through the interweaving of human expression and computer operations. NOW Ensemble plays minimally notated pitch material — single notes, dyads, chords, but no rhythms — according to a variety of strategies I describe in prose instructions. Their playing responds to the ever-changing sonic environments the computer creates through the manipulation of field recording samples, drones, fleeting sine-tone melodies, and fragments of spoken text.

divine the rest is like a timeless walk through a radiant summer afternoon’s nap. If sleep became a space you could enter, you might hear just these sensual murmurings right up close. There’s a moment of a Mediterranean string. Droplets of piano strokes land softly on your head. A woodwind’s flutter of a question grazes your back, gone before you can see it. Effortless, gentle progress is occurring as phrase after phrase brushes against your mind, each one so much more comely and calming than those in that manuscript you’ve just dozed off on.

[pullquote]I have found it very hard to make meaningful music in this in-between world between composition and improvisation. divine the rest was in many ways a big first step.”[/pullquote]

When I ask him about his libretto for the piece, this is what he tells me:

I took an essay by Miguel de Unamuno and separated all the parts of speech out of it. I recorded all the nouns, the verbs, adjectives, etcetera, then gave the software the ability to assemble this vocabulary into new, ambiguous, fragmentary texts. These texts are put together by the computer on the fly; they’ll also be different for every performance. The fact that they’re computer-generated adds a layer of strangeness or ambiguity that underlines the “dream logic” of the piece. The texts are grammatically correct but sort of oblique and counter-intuitive, like something you might hear in a dream.

Supko is Duke University’s Hunt Family Assistant Professor of Music. And he’s one of the most accessible adventurers in musical exploration today. What’s more, he’s one of those people whose talk about his work enriches it enormously.

In divine the rest, the listener hears a voice, no, feels a voice that makes Rod Serling sound like a carnival barker. And that’s where we start when I put some questions to him about the work. I refer to the voice track as lyrics.

‘Inside My Head’

TC: Knowing how much of the moment — how improvisational — each performance of this piece is, there’s a wistful, soothing contemplative aspect to this edition — is that likely to always be the case, or could something, say, more upbeat, less provocative be produced in another performance?

John Supko: It’s my voice you’re hearing. There’s some light vocoding [voice coding] and comb filtering added to the sound of my voice to give it a harmonic grounding. I don’t think of it as a poem, just a concatenation of fragmented thoughts and images that may or may not create meaning as they accumulate. I should also mention that it was my intention to obscure the text in places so that it comes in and out of focus. It’s not important for the listener to hear and understand the entire text. It’s just another element in the sound world that may or may not convey meaning depending on the person listening.

JS: The meditative tone of the piece comes, first and foremost, from my desire to give the listener the experience of being inside my head: I’m trying to recreate, insofar as possible, a slice of my interior life, an immersive dip into the mix of sounds, thoughts, images and impressions that collide and melt, appear and disappear in my mind. The wistfulness also comes from the the mix of specially chosen sound files — the wind, the soft acoustic and electronic chords, the field recordings (rain, sea, birds, traffic, trains, insects) — and the harmonic material, which is essentially in a minor mode, though there is some ambiguity as to which one.

The electronic part of the piece, though always different in each new performance, will essentially retain its cinematic melancholy no matter what decisions the computer makes. This electronic environment in turn suggests to the performers the mood that they should adopt for their parts, or at least that’s what happens in practice.

It might be interesting to ask the players to try to subvert the emotional information the electronic part is giving them. I’d be up for trying a version like that in the future, but I should say that it wasn’t part of my original intention for the piece. “Random within a range” is a good way to think about the decision-making of the computer in this piece. I deliberately set the range of choices the computer has so that the results always produce the same general “feel,” even if the specific melodies and sound file combinations are never the same twice.